It's a podcast. About comics. It's Monthly. So there!

Main menu

Post navigation

02 – Half of Superman

Welcome to episode 2! We run down the breaking Superman lawsuit news, The Sixth Gun TV prospects, the idea that you can now submit your own creator controlled comics to Comixology and make a little scratch, Stan Lee Media sues Marvel, and Stan Lee has nothing to do with it, Kurtz makes a passionate argument against doing anything with Peanuts ever again, our thoughts on Arrow, Mage: The Hero Discovered, Elementals, Grendel, Green Arrow: Year One, Ultimate Spiderman and AvX stuff, Matman 13 and the return of The Joker, The Shadow, and MORE!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

??? The Boys are so not violence for violence sake.
The second episode of this podcast was excellent and 10 times better than episode 1, where you were pretty mad at the (comic)world.
Love to listen – but please, please Garth Ennis violence is a mean and not an end.

If possible, could you have this podcast available on the windows marketplace/ Windows Phone please! The last comic dorks podcast was unbelievable and inspired me to go get myself a comic! Thanks for all the awesome work you guys put out!

Love the show guy! BTW, not sure if you looked into this sponsor, but Instock Trades would seem like a great fit for this podcast. I know they’ve sponsored a few other comic book-themed podcasts. If you haven’t, check them out http://www.instocktrades.com. I’ve bought a bunch of trades from them and always have great service.

I weirdly love this podcast though I never really read comics. But you have fired up a comic nerd in me so I think I will dust of my Walking Dead book and by The Sixth Gun and give it one more try. Keep up the podcast, I love the current format and you guys great dynamic!

Duuuudes. I was referred to this podcast by my former art director, and it is some excellent, excellent stuff. ( Pardon me if I go off topic — I wanted to comment on the first episode, but could not.)

I’m a former print comics colorist turned webcomicker and I agree with Scott Kurtz on a good number of points brought up in the first podcast — particularly that your content will no longer be locked to your domain, but needs to be spread all over social media to reach a wider audience.

We have several thousand Facebook followers, and honestly — they don’t want to go to the site to read and comment the comic. I tried to “corral” those readers over in my domain (to rack up some extra page views and ad revenue) but all it did was piss them off. So the comic pages are essentially mirrored on various social media now (Facebook, deviantArt, tumblr, etc.)

Wherever we picked up our readers, that’s usually where they want to stay. So we’re trying to meet them where they’re at. Facebook is different than the tumblr crowd, which is different than reddit, etc.

“Cloud comicking” is the way of the future, I think… it’s just making it so much harder to come up with ways to make money off your work.

Where we’re at now is that we’re into the beginning of our third year, get about a million page views a month (on a longform fantasy comic) and are finally making some quasi-decent ad revenue. We had an overfunded Kickstarter a few months ago and are releasing our first omnibus graphic novel (hopefully) next month. We’ve been guests at some cons, speaking on the subject of webcomics and whatnot. We’re even in Wikipedia.

But you know what? I’m still working a day job (as a web marketing flack, ironically enough). Compared to many of our peers, we’re “successful” but it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it most days.

So I have to wonder… has all of this social sharing and easy accessibility to the tools necessary to publish *devalued* original works? I mean, if there’s no barrier to entry there’s a glut of material to wade through out there. Sure, a lot of it isn’t that good, but some is decent enough and people are giving this stuff away. To most, that beats $3.99 a pop any day.

So what about those of us who still have a dream of making some kind of full-time career off of self-publishing? The Kickstarter gets the books printed, but what’s the business plan for *in between* the crowd-sourcing? I’m not expecting answers, per se, just throwing it out there because we’re still muddling through it ourselves. People seem to dig our stuff, but we have a hell of a time getting them to *pay* for it sometimes.

The internet is used to FREE. Especially younger readers, who make up the majority of our readership. They tell us that they love our stuff… awesome… but that doesn’t pay the mortgage.

Our generation used to thank hardworking creators by giving them a few bucks. Kids today feel a “Like” or an “upvote” is sufficient. Not their fault, just a sig of the times.

Now, I’m certainly open to any advice or opinion from Mr. Kurtz on this. He’s been successful to do this full-time, but built his business in a different internet IMHO. Short of hopping in a time machine, what’s a self publisher in 2012 to do? Just being able to DO a quasi-successful comic doesn’t mean you can actually make a LIVING at it.

Alright… sorry for the rantiness. I spend a good chunk of my waking hours trying to “figure this out” and tend to vomit my opinions all over the internet when given the opportunity. Ha ha.

BTW, my name is Thom Pratt and the comic is Shadowbinders (http://www.shadowbinders.com — currently on Keenspot due to hosting issues. I understand that Mr. Kurtz isn’t a fan of Keenspot, but they did step in when we needed some help.)